


Not Broken; Just Bent

by punkrockgaia



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Character sketches, Fluff, Homophobia, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:48:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockgaia/pseuds/punkrockgaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos and Cecil reflect separately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Carlos

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of a pair of character sketches. Goes along with my other stories, I guess they're all in the same canon....

Carlos almost didn't answer the phone. He stared at the number through one, two, three rings, then finally pressed "Answer."

"Hello, Graciela."

"Hola, Carlito, how are you?"

"I'm ..." he paused for a long moment, then realized he couldn't hold down his feelings. "I'm in love, Gracie."

"Oh, oh, that's wonderful! We've been waiting for so long. Who is she?"

"He."

A pause. "We'll pray for you, Carlos."

Normally he would have hung up at this point, but this time he didn't. He wanted her to understand, wanted her to _know_.

So he told her.

Told her about the loopy white boy with the cracked-out grin who had captured his heart. Told her everything that had happened, that she knew but couldn't know.

That growing up, in their family, with a mother in love with Jesus and a father in love with his vision of America, he'd never fit in. He was the only boy, the last of three. Even though it was unspoken, somehow he'd always known that if he hadn't been a boy, he wouldn't have been the last. His folks would have kept having kids until his father got a goddamn _heir_ , even if his mother had been worn out like a broken plastic bag by the end of it all.

But he was the chosen one. He grew, sitting between his parents. 

He sat in the pews of one church after another, his mother looking for the one that would save her, make her feel _redeemed_. He didn't like going to church, but he liked the way that his mother smiled when he sat with her in his clean, pressed suit. He was good at church, good at being good. And his mother wanted him to pray, so he prayed.

He sat (or ran) through football practice when he would have much rather been out in the forest by himself; his father so determined that their neighbors understood that they were the **same as they were**. He hated football, but he was actually pretty good, naturally big and strong and fast. And his dad wanted him to play, so he played. 

He knew he wasn't _right_ , but maybe he could pretend enough to make it real.

At age 15, he cracked like a broken flowerpot. One day, the pull of what he wanted and what he thought he was supposed to want tugged so tight he had no choice. 

It wasn't other boys, wasn't sex at that point. It was the lab. It called to him more than any muddy practice field ever had. He had the choice to stay after and do an additional chemistry assignment or go to practice. Hands and knees shaking, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, he chose beakers and Bunsen burners over shoulder pads and jock straps. 

His parents were okay with it, at first. His father grudgingly hoped that perhaps he could go into an applied science, something lucrative like engineering or this computer stuff he'd started to hear about. His mother just hoped he wouldn't deny the Holy Bible and become a Godless Evolutionist. 

Carlos, ultimately, couldn't give a shit.

He threw himself into everything he'd been denied -- well, _nearly_ everything.

He fell in love with reason. He soaked up every science course he could, no matter the discipline. He discovered magazines like _Skeptical Inquirer,_ and learned that there was life outside the God he'd feared every Sunday as a child, the one that he was fairly sure would disapprove of the way his thoughts had started to lean. 

He fell in love with loud, brutal rock music. The louder, the more brutal, the better. And if they hailed Satan once or twice in their lyrics, well, the more the better. He knew that it made his mother cringe, but he also knew that if she really knew him, she'd be cringing much more.

He fell in love with fantasy. He discovered Dungeons and Dragons, found out that he could be someone else, someone strong, someone _magical_. That love affair hadn't lasted as long as his affair with science or hard rock, but he found himself thinking of it from time to time lately....

Because around the time he'd discovered he could easily straddle the world between the geeks and the stoners, he'd discovered something else about himself. Yet another way he wasn't "normal." When his friends, the Halfling cleric and the Human fighter and the Wemic ranger lusted after the comely Human female bard (coincidentally endowed with the same features as the head cheerleader at school), his elven mage was in love with the curve of that one's ropy neck, this one's beefy bicep, that one's lips and the sparse dark hairs that curled over them (acne nothwithstanding). Of course, Zartan the Magnificent never let any of that slip; he was known throughout the realms as a celibate, totally in thrall to the pursuit of arcane knowledge. 

Carlos strove to become the same. If Zartan could do it, so could he. Knowledge was pure and he was pure, and he didn't want anything, surely not the touch of another man, to mess up all that damn purity. So he spent his last two years of high school with his knees pinched piously together and his forehead buried in one book or another. He even had a "girlfriend," a nice girl who cared a lot about him and who honestly believed that he wanted to wait until marriage, even to do too much kissing. His parents loved her, and loved him a little more, too, maybe. 

Then came college. He hadn't gone far, just into the city, to the U of Chicago, but it had been like a whole new world. The "girlfriend" had faded into the background, perhaps sadly (who knows?) when he neglected to call her back. Sometimes people don't call. 

He dove into research, and ultimately, Duncan.

Oh, Duncan. Even taller and broader and smarter than he, skin of ebony, lips of molasses sweetness. They'd come together (he thought) over shared circumstance and coincidence. They were both people "of color," both salmon swimming upstream in the harsh current of the science curriculum in a school where it was lovingly said that fun comes to die. Carlos didn't care. He didn't need fun. He had Duncan.

Duncan introduced him to sex, and introduced him to the idea that he might not be wrong and crazy. Carlos got bold. Duncan encouraged him to take... steps. He still cringed, thinking about that awful Thanksgiving, his mother and sisters crying, his father red-faced, ordering him out of the house. Going back to the dorms, and Duncan not there (of course, his family was back in Boston), and crying himself to sleep.

When Duncan came back from the break, he held Carlos and told him that he didn't need a family, that he'd always be there for him. And that had lasted for about two more semesters. As time went by, though, Carlos noticed him becoming... distant. Distracted. He started spending a lot of time with Dr. McRyan. Duncan said he was doing "research." Then, one day, Carlos came back to their shared student apartment to find all of Duncan's binders and piles of disorganized notes absent from the apartment. His clothes, his CDs, his VHS cassettes were still there, but he knew what had happened; he was gone. Duncan's shamefaced shuffle of ephemera from their apartment to McRyan's didn't tell him anything more, other than that his research opportunities had suddenly become rather more limited.

After that, things changed. He shut off his heart as much as he could. Yes, he still needed another body once in a while, but just for momentary pleasure. He became wary of _white_ bodies particularly. They always seemed to want something more. They wanted to hear about his life in the barrio, when in fact he'd grown up in Oak Lawn; his gang had been armed with nothing more deadly than 20-sided dice and Jolt Cola. He couldn't be their Latin Fantasy, nor did he want to be. But regardless of the color of the skin he rubbed up against, that was all it was -- skin, flesh.

He'd also made tentative contact with his family. He couldn't erase what had happened, but he felt he could perhaps bury it. His family was all too happy to do so, or so it seemed. Communications with his mother and his father were very strained (going against Jesus and the conservative orthodoxy were wounds hard to mend), but he could at least talk to his sisters, Graciela and Marisol. Gracie, the oldest, the little mother, called the most. 

And through the years he'd sanitized his conversations for her, for both of them. Sure, it made it easy for her to not know what he'd been up to, but it wasn't like it mattered. Who cared if there was a co-worker or bar friend he was grinding up against once in a while? There was nothing else. Nothing. 

And then he'd come to Night Vale, and again, everything, as things will, changed. 

There was this loopy-ass fucking white boy. A white boy with eyes like grape bubblegum and a mouth twice as sweet, with a crooked tooth that tasted _delicious_ when he traced it with the tip of his tongue. A white boy that dressed like the Great Gatsby at work and like a psychedelic nightmare at home, but he liked him best naked. 

And he was aware that Gracie had hung up a while ago, but he didn't care, he kept talking. Talking to the ring tone, to the representative of the Sheriff's Secret Police, and ultimately, though he'd never hear it, to Cecil. 

He kept talking, talking about how his lover was the first one who loved him for who he was, not _what_ he was... How surprised he was that Cecil thought of him as a scientist, not as some Latin Lover fantasy. How, for the first time in his life, he was _courted._

And he's simultaneously sad and happy that Gracie's still not on the line, because he's talking about how he was made love to, not with body, but with care and with words and with a fucking gorgeous velvet honey voice. And how, now, for the first time in his WHOLE FUCKING LIFE, he's happy.

And yes, that's true. He's been... not _unhappy_ before, and, by himself, content, but before now he's never understood the part in every romantic movie where someone just wants to SHOUT about their love from a rooftop or a city street. He's way, way too reserved to do that, of course, but Cecil makes him _feel_ it. For the first time in his life, there is giggling, heavenly light, and that light is Cecil.

The phone is droning its "call ended" drone, so he hits the End Call button. He pauses a moment, then dials a (by now) well-known number.


	2. Cecil

Cecil plugs the bathroom sink and fills it with a slow stream of warm water from the tap. He approaches it slowly, carefully, a quick glance upward to the mirror, which remains resolutely covered by a towel. He lets his eyes shift quickly to the sink to see his shadowy reflection. It seems okay. He guesses it's okay. 

Is the calm surface of water in a plugged basin a mirror? He doesn't think it qualifies, but still, as he approaches, he imagines a hand reaching out and grabbing him by the throat.

For the past few weeks, for the first time in a long time, he cares if it does.

Today, there's no hand, at least not yet. He sighs a sigh of relief and lathers up the blond whiskers that have sprouted out of his face overnight, and as he does, he ponders.

The inside of Cecil's head is like a Carnival. For the most part, it's loud and bright and smells vaguely of cotton candy and churros. Sure, the rides are maybe a little unsafe, but who can really tell? And sometimes (he thinks of it as the top of the Ferris Wheel) he can see _everything_ , and that's wonderful. All of his beloved beautiful Night Vale, all there for him to watch over and keep safe. 

But then there's other times. When he gets... lost. 

If he's _trying_ to make it happen, if he's trying to poke in those dark areas just outside the Carnival borders, where strange people smoke cigarettes and pass pint bottles and spit and curse, well, he kind of deserves it. And it's okay. He would never tell anyone this, but sometimes he actually relishes the headache. It's the only pain he's ever felt, and when it happens it feels like he's earned something, the little fragment of whatever. He doesn't do it much, of course, because he has a _responsibility_ to be okay. The town needs him, and he needs the town. He doesn't love vomiting afterwards, of course, and the lost time... Well, again, this is something best attempted on days off.

But when he tries to make it happen, it's not so bad. The bad times are when he gets lost in the Fun House.

That's how he thinks of it. He'll be asleep and dreaming, or worse, awake, and something will make him think of something in the Fun House.

A smell of waffles. And he's sitting at the table at Old Woman Josie's, so very hungry but trying to figure out how to sneak the waffles in his pockets to bring... home... for someone... 

A chill on the soles of his feet. A memory, flitting behind his eyes, of being dragged barefoot through the cold nighttime desert streets by a boy just a little older than himself, running away from... 

The feeling of a dog's fur, warm against his hand. The memory of a dog that he loved, then a feeling of sadness and fear and something unknowable and horrible and utter resignation...

A woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. Wanting someone to tell him it's all okay...

And once he's in the Fun House, it's hard to get out. He can't feel _real_ somehow. These weird sensations, memories not connected to anything... And he hasn't seen himself in years, except in the basin or in photographs (like the one on his desk), and he doesn't feel pain in his body, only in his head when the memories come, and sometimes it's easy to believe that he's not real, and that has lead to some very very bad experiments in the past... Experiments that past lovers couldn't understand, that even after he'd proven his existence had left him alone in an endless void. Real but alone in the void was the worst. He'd rather not exist.

Holding the razor tightly in his hand, he takes a deep breath and sits down on the shut toilet seat lid, head clutched in his hands, bowed between his knees.

Then he remembers there's something else now. A strong, warm hand that grasps his and leads him out of the Fun House, and out of the Carnival entirely, on a good night. To a safe place. 

_Carlos._

Oh, Gods, what does he even look like? He starts to panic, thinking that even this is unreal.

Then he remembers: Oh, perfection, rapture...

Dark copper skin... It seems delicate and hard to touch, but, wonder of wonders! It isn't. It's just as sturdy as his own, and warm and pliable and moist. And his eyes are dark and beautiful and infinite, and his mouth and tongue wet just like Cecil's own. 

And his hair. Well, enough has been said about that, probably. It goes without saying that it is **perfect**. It's black and curly, like the way the night comes in as Cecil watches it from his lonely chair at the station. He sometimes curls the tendrils around his fingers and feels like they're curling around his heart.

But it's not what he _IS_ , not that, not even his perfect, perfect hair.

Carlos is the earth. He's the smell of the desert after the rain. He's the warm comforting closeness of the blankets when you are ill (a momentary flash of a woman with stars in her eyes tucking him in, it recedes quickly), he's mountains (if they existed), he's the sea (if it were real). Cecil doesn't need wings, he needs a tether. Carlos is the warmest, most wonderful tether. He enfolds his trembling limbs, even from across town, reminds him that he IS.

Carlos who loves him not for what he is (the Voice), but who he is (Cecil). And who maybe, maybe, can see what a mess he is, but isn't running for the hills. 

He's **FUCKING REAL**.

Shaking, Cecil stands and sets his razor down on the side of the basin and collects himself. At that moment, in his apartment, his phone begins to ring.

He smiles. He knows, just like he knows the traffic on Route 800 at this very moment, he knows he's not alone.


End file.
